Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State

Walid Khalidi

From Foreign Affairs, July 1978

Summary:  Every time the Palestinian resistance is clobbered, or appears to be so, there is new hope in some quarters that the Palestinian component of the Arab-Israeli conflict will somehow disappear from the Middle Eastern scene. Such was the case after the showdown in Jordan in 1970-71, and the Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976; such is the case today after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. However, the hope will remain elusive because it is based on a fallacy. This is that the salience of the Palestinian component of the Arab-Israeli conflict is necessarily a function of the organizational strength or military prowess of the Palestinians.

Walid Khalidi, who was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, is Professor of Political Studies at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, which is publishing his forthcoming book, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: Confrontation in the Middle East. He is the editor of From Haven to Conquest and co-editor of The Palestine Problem and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: An Annotated Bibliography.

Every time the Palestinian resistance is clobbered, or appears to be so, there is new hope in some quarters that the Palestinian component of the Arab-Israeli conflict will somehow disappear from the Middle Eastern scene. Such was the case after the showdown in Jordan in 1970-71, and the Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976; such is the case today after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. However, the hope will remain elusive because it is based on a fallacy. This is that the salience of the Palestinian component of the Arab-Israeli conflict is necessarily a function of the organizational strength or military prowess of the Palestinians.

II

The Arab states' system is first and foremost a "Pan" system. It postulates the existence of a single Arab Nation behind the facade of a multiplicity of sovereign states. In pan-Arab ideology, this Nation is actual, not potential. It is a present reality, not a distant goal. The manifest failure even to approximate unity does not negate the empirical reality of the Arab Nation. It merely adds normative and prescriptive dimensions to the ideology of pan-Arabism. The Arab Nation both is, and should be, one.

From this perspective, the individual Arab states are deviant and transient entities: their frontiers illusory and permeable; their rulers interim caretakers, or obstacles to be removed. Champions of pan-Arabism speak in the name of vox populi. Their mandate is from the entire Arab Nation. Before such super-legitimacy, the legitimacy of the individual state shrinks into irrelevance. It is these credentials that pan-Arabists of various hues have presented and continue to present, be they a dynasty (the Hashemites), a party (the Arab Nationalist Movement, the Baath, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), a charismatic leader (Nasser), or an aspirant to his mantle (Qaddafi).

The oneness of the Arab Nation has corollaries in the concepts of the dignity of the Nation, and the oneness and therefore the inviolability of its territory "from the [Atlantic] Ocean to the [Arab/Persian] Gulf." These concepts together constitute the central value system of the Arab states' system. To be sure, they are not uniformly manifested in the five great regions that make up the Arab world - the Fertile Crescent, the Gulf, the Peninsula, the Nile Valley and the Maghreb - nor in the countries of each region. But for historical, religious and cultural reasons they find powerful resonance among the vast majority of Arabs at every level of society throughout these regions. It is this resonance that gives them sanctity as dogmas. And it is this sanctity that gives them their key functional role within the parallelogram of "raisons" that make up the resultant stuff of the Arab political process. These are: raison d'état, raison du status quo, raison de la révolution, and raison de la nation.

Unlike the four natural seasons of the universe, the four "raisons" of the Arab political universe operate concurrently - not in two compartments in opposition to one another but diagonally and dialectically. Raison d'état no less than raison de la révolution can invoke raison de la nation, while even raison du status quo can invoke both these latter. Only explicit or transparent raison d'état is heresy. The other side of the coin is that "pan-Arab" interventionism, whether offensive or defensive, does not operate only at the level of incumbent elites. It is geared also to counter-elites in the target states. Perpetually Janus-faced, incumbents (whether conservative or radical) look both across the border and at their counter-elites. These latter look across the same border for "pan-Arab" help against their incumbents. Irrespective of the degree or kind of commitment to them, the concepts of pan-Arabism are functionally the most effective tools of change and legitimization in the hands of the Arab political elite.

III

The Palestine Problem encapsulates the concepts of pan-Arabism. It is not difficult to see why. By definition the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab Nation. Therefore, by definition the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people was suffered by the Nation. Again, the loss of Palestine is the de-Arabization of Arab territory. It is thus a violation of the principles of the unity and integrity of Arab soil, an affront to the dignity of the Nation.

Until recently these premises have held unchallenged sway, setting Arab perceptions of Zionism and Israel into a seemingly unbreakable mold. Within this mold the Zionist colonization of Palestine appears as a latter-day Crusade. (The conquest of East Jerusalem in 1967 instantly reactivated memories of its fall and reconquest by Saladin.) Simultaneously, Zionist colonization is but an extension of nineteenth century European encroachment on Asia and Africa. Building on the debris of Western World War I promises to the Arabs, it matured within the womb of imperial Britain. The U.N. partition resolution of 1947 was the outcome of superpower manipulation, a travesty of the principle of self-determination by a country's (Arab) majority.1 Western support of Jewish immigration to Palestine was an exercise in charity at the expense of others. The Arabs and Muslims have had little difficulty in rejecting Jewish political title to Palestine on the basis of Divine Right. They have some difficulty in understanding the morality of punishing the Palestinians for the Holocaust.

To the Arabs the loss of Palestine was all the more poignant because it entailed the dismantling of Palestinian communal life and the pauperization of the bulk of its people. It was more threatening than the form of European colonialism experienced by most of them. This had been characterized by the imposition of an alien regime of control and administration. As in the case of French colonization of Algeria, Zionist colonization of Palestine involved the double process of the displacement of the resident population and its replacement through massive alien immigration. It was all the more antithetical to the principles of pan-Arabism because Israel occupied a pivotal part of the Arab world, separating its Asiatic from its African halves. It was all the more feared because of its territorial dynamism and the seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of Western and particularly American support it commanded. To many Arabs, especially the bulk of the younger generation, Israel is the beachhead of American imperialism in the Middle East and its executioner. With independence achieved by all Arab states and the process of decolonization almost completed in the Third World, the unique and anachronistic plight of Palestine became all the more intolerable in Arab eyes.